Hi!
After doing a couple of updates on my servers today, I noticed that one of them had syntax highlighting in vim disabled. I double-checked to see that it was still vim that was installed, and not vi. Indeed it was, so I tried entering a couple of vim commands in order to re-enable syntax highlighting.
A couple of minutes of trying and searching the Internet went by till I got the idea to directly compare the vim version info both on one of my servers that had it working properly and the one that didn't. It turned out that even though it was the same version number and build with the same compile time it had a certain difference: one line said "Tiny version without GUI." vs. "Huge version without GUI.". The tiny version was the one that wasn't highlighting correctly.
So I checked out what the package manager thought of this:
# yum list *vim*
[...]
Installed Packages
vim-common.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed
vim-enhanced.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed
vim-minimal.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed
Available Packages
vim-X11.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 base
Somehow during updating it had apparently decided to install the vim-minimal package as well. And of course it wasn't installed on the server on which vim worked as it should.
Fair enough. I thought to myself that removing should fix it, but when I tried to it said the following:
# yum remove vim-minimal
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Setting up Remove Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package vim-minimal.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 set to be erased
--> Processing Dependency: vim-minimal for package: sudo
--> Running transaction check
---> Package sudo.i386 0:1.7.2p1-13.el5 set to be erased
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Dependencies Resolved
============================================================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
============================================================================================================
Removing:
vim-minimal i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed 581 k
Removing for dependencies:
sudo i386 1.7.2p1-13.el5 installed 861 k
Transaction Summary
============================================================================================================
Remove 2 Package(s)
Reinstall 0 Package(s)
Downgrade 0 Package(s)
Is this ok [y/N]:
That was weird. It felt the need to remove sudo along with it. Of course that was not okay for me, so I tried looking for a parameter for vim in order to ignore the dependencies, but apparently there are none (any more).
The solution I found after a couple of more minutes of searching the Internet was to remove the package via the actual rpm program. But don't you need the original rpm file for vim-minimal? No, you don't!
First you have to find out the complete package name, however. That can be done like this:
# rpm -qa | grep vim-minimal
vim-minimal-7.0.109-7.el5.i386
And finally just use the following command:
# rpm -e --nodeps vim-minimal-7.0.109-7.el5.i386
whereas the last parameter is of course the proper name of the package in question. --nodeps, as you might have figured already, stands for "no dependencies" and removes the package without any questions asked.
In the end, these simple steps restored the syntax highlighting functionality for my vim.
Let's hope that after the next update it doesn't decide to go monochrome again.
Thanks for reading!
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Hey!
If you have been using the Linux console text editor vim (or: Vi IMproved), you have probably noticed already that at times - especially in files with a large amount of comments - the default color scheme on a black background is less than ideal. Dark blue on black is pretty hard to read and can strain the eyes a lot.
So today I went out to see if somebody had come up with a solution for this particular problem. I saw people who changed console colors by exporting and overwriting certain system variables, and others who edited the default color scheme.
The simplest solution I have found to this problem is just switching the color scheme. You can do that by typing the following in the already open vim session:
:colorscheme desert
where desert is just an example for the scheme of choice. Desert - for me - has just the right color for comments: aquamarine / light blue.
If you are satisfied with the scheme and would like it to be applied each time you launch vim, you can just edit /etc/vim/vimrc (or in my case with CentOS: /etc/vimrc) and add the following line:
colorscheme desert
with desert again, of course, being the chosen color scheme. This would apply this setting automatically for each vim instance that is launched system-wide. If you do not have access to the system-wide preferences or prefer just using it for your own user account, edit the ~/.vimrc instead.
The blog entry I got this tip from (Asher's space) has further instructions on how to edit existing color schemes and even a link to a blog post that explains how to edit the dark blue color for directories in ls listings with color, but I did not feel the need to go that far. If you are interested in that topic I can only encourage you to visit the original post.
Thanks for reading!
Update (2012-01-04):
Okay, looks like pingback isn't working, so here's a direct link to the original blog post:
vi code highlighting: change the default comments color from dark blue to light blue (https://asher2003.wordpress.com/)
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